About HelpCenter Live!

At last Help Center Live (or HCL) is back, with a bang! Long considered one of the best Online Live Help systems, HCL is getting new life. Part of this new life is the development of a community. Our community will largely be responsible for the directions we will be taking.

If your looking to download HCL, look to the left, and click on the Download HCL link. You will be directed to our Source Forge project page.
Modules and Themes

"Modules" are expansions of the core being of HCL. These build on the solid foundation of the HCL core and add usefulness to the system. Examples would be trouble tickets, knowledgebase systems, crm, and more. Because of this modularity, the developers of the core can focus on building a solid foundation, and individual developers or groups of developers can focus on their "hot potato". Some modules are like plug-ins, small little pieces of code that add a special function, or they may be integration of entirely different Open Source software.

"Themes" are a great way to change the look and feel of a online application. Most themes are best used for building your own site. By using a pre-made theme, you can then tweak it so it fits perfectly with your ideas of how everything should look. HCL has a flexible theming system based on Smarty, probably the most powerful and definately most used theming engine in the world. Smarty is so smart, there are even modules (or plugins) for it!
WinApp

The "WinApp" client application which was once distributed by UberTec is not supported here. That software is NOT Open Source. However there are plans to document the API for client applications so others may be able to build their own apps. All software distributed with HCL MUST BE OPEN SOURCE! I can not stress that enough. Mr. Mike Bird was kind enough to allow the resumption of coding on HCL, using the HCL name, and in fact even using his server. Mike is still with us! But UberTec is away at this point. What the future might bring, one can never tell...
So what happened to get HCL started again?

The long and the short of it was that I contacted Mike Bird about becoming a developer on the project. I had noticed that it had been dormant for a while, and thought some new blood might help kick things into gear. At that point he suggested forking HCL, which I started to do. Along the way, I found that most of the evil nasty bugs were not even in HCL, but in an old module that had itself forked. After getting coding, picking a name, and building some web infostructure, I was having a discussion on a forum with others about HCL, and along comes Mike, offering to let me help take on HCL. The rest is history.

Ironically, there are now two Mikes. Mike Bird, the original author, and Michael Anderson, the new guy! As the new guy on the project, I offer up that folks that want to see clean easy to maintain code need to see what Mike has given us. I've been involved with e-commerce, web hosting control panels, games, etc. And I've rarely seen code as well done as what Mike has brought to the table. The bugs in the upcoming version are most likely my own. The stability and fast running code are likely credits to Mike B.

Where are we?
At this point, I'm mostly getting rid of the very ancient osTicket code and putting eTicket (it's successor) in. After that we're going to do some minor additions to the module code to allow some really cool things to be possible.

Additionally, a big milestone has been started, to rebuild the HCL community. I know it's a pain to register for a web site, however we need all the brain power we can get. Some people are afraid their ideas are stupid. That's ok to. About 17 years ago, I decided I needed to have at least 10 stupid ideas a day. I'm up to 50 or so a day now. You never know what stupid idea isn't so stupid (Can you say BLOG?)

The next big phase, while we're alpha testing HCL is to start getting documentation started. When Mike and I were working together to get this site up, I nearly installed Drupal (I even uploaded it!), however a lot of Drupal isn't needed. What is needed is some first class forums (I've always been partial to SMF/YaBB) and a way to help distribute modules outside of the Source Forge project page. SMF/Tiny portal solves this. I'll be starting to work on updating documentation, although the next release is rather close to the previous versions. Once we get this started, we can build it from there.

Lastly, once the Phoenix release is out, a road map for the core needs to be started. It's so much easier to get where you are going, when you know where it is...

- We hope you enjoy Help Center Live, and welcome to the community!